Dan Mayer's Blog

I have a close friend in California after prop 8 passed he wrote an open letter to it's supporters. I thought it was a great letter worth sharing with as many people as would listen. So I present it here. If you would like to find out ways to help the good fight check out, No On Prop8.

I present a guest post, with his permission of course, by my friend Bobby Atwood.

An Open Letter to the supporters of Proposition 8

You have given your time, your money and your energy to a cause that has attempted to create a second-class citizenry in the United States of America. You have given your time, your money, and your energy to the cause of corrupting the Constitution of California with the first mention of discrimination against its own people. You have given your time, your money, and your energy to the cause of destroying thousands of loving unions between two people. And, congratulations, you succeeded. So, now the question that you should ask yourself: Are you happy now?

We certainly are not. In fact, we are furious. The problem is, you see us as gays and lesbians, but we see ourselves as Americans. You would do yourself a huge favor to look back through the history of this great country and see that in the war of oppression against Americans, your side has always lost. Not only have you lost, but your failures are seen as epic and painful embarrassments that we, as a country, try our hardest to forget. We don't want to believe that America would allow segregation, Japanese internment camps, prohibiting women from voting, and most ironically, the anti-Mormon movements of the 19th century.

The only difference between this Civil Rights movement and all of those that have come before us is that you can't tell us apart by the color of our skin, our sex, or the country that our parents came from. We are your sons, your daughters, your mothers, your fathers, your brothers, your sisters, your cousins, your doctors, your lawyers, your teachers, your public servants… and not one of us looks like the other. Actually, we look just like you.

Maybe you didn't think Obama would win, but he did, and you will hear the echoes of his landslide in our calls of "YES WE CAN" until we are equal.

We are Americans, and we will not give up. We never have, and we never will. The only end in sight is equality, so for the sake of your children's pride in the actions of your generation, please get out of our way.